This is the home of the ESGEM-AMR Working Group, which focuses on curating organism-specific rule sets for interpreting AMR genotypes under the AMRrules framework.
The goal of AMRrules is to develop interpretive standards for AMR genotypes, akin to the interpretive standards developed by EUCAST and CLSI for antimicrobial susceptibility phenotyping.
An overview of the AMRrules concept and software is available in these slides and the AMRrules documentation, and version 1 rules curated by ESGEM-AMR are available here.
In 2024 ESGEM, the ESCMID Study Group on Epidemiological Markers, partnered with the AMRrules team to form the ESGEM-AMR Working Group to curate organism-specific rule sets for AMRrules.
The convenors of ESGEM-AMR are Kat Holt (LSHTM), Natacha Couto (ESGEM Chair), and Jane Hawkey (Monash, leading bioinformatics development). We have ~200 members (listed here), structured into:
- Organism-focused subgroups who curate AMRrules for their focus organism (species or genus), and
- Data & Tools subgroup who developed the AMRrules specification and contribute to technical development and interoperability with other tools in the AMR genomics ecosystem.
An initial call for members was launched at the ESGEM General Meeting in April 2024. We have now grown to nearly 200 members (listed here).
ESGEM-AMR members volunteer their time to the working group, which involves attending monthly group-wide calls (slides are publicly available here), as well as subgroup-specific meetings and activities to encode rules. All members agree to the group's Terms of Reference and Code of Ethics.
Additional requests to join ESGEM-AMR will be considered periodically. You may register your interest and let us know what organism/s you have expertise in, using this form. We are particularly interested in hearing from potential new members with expertise in organisms for which there is not yet a subgroup, or with small subgroups (see list here).
We have partnered with EUCAST to ensure alignment of the AMRrules approach with the EUCAST Subcommittee on WGS and Phenotypic AST (including their first report (2017) and ongoing updates), as well as important EUCAST concepts and guidance including Expected Phenotypes, Expert Rules, wildtype distributions and ECOFFS, and Resistance Mechanisms.
ESGEM-AMR members include individuals from allied resources like the Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database (CARD), NCBI Pathogens, the Beta-Lactamase DataBase (BLDB), the Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology (PHA4GE) and others, which helps ensure our efforts are aligned with the goals of the broader AMR genomics community.
We are keen to partner with other allied organisations and initiatives, please get in touch if you'd like to discuss.